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Welcome to the pleasure dome: bringing the Café Royal back to life

Oscar Wilde, David Bowie and Winston Churchill all revelled in the gilded splendour of the Café Royal, and its ornate interiors have been brought back to life for the 21st century by David Chipperfield. But was the master of minimalism the right man for this lavish palace of decadence? Marcus Field finds out

Sir David Chipperfield is standing in the entrance hall of the Café Royal on Regent Street, casting an architect’s eye over the final stages of his three-year project to transform the famous restaurant and bar into London’s grandest hotel.

A more evocative golden nugget around which to build such a place could hardly exist. It was here among the gilded splendours, mirrored walls and fripperies of an institution dating back to 1865 that some of the most legendary figures in British history met to party and play. In the 1890s Lord Alfred Douglas fluttered his eyelashes at Oscar Wilde over champagne while Aubrey Beardsley frolicked on the banquettes. Later, art-world bohemians including Augustus John and the members of the Vorticist group gathered to drink absinthe and discuss new ideas. Politicians and royalty came, too, with Winston Churchill and the Prince of Wales lunching extravagantly be-neath the painted ceiling of the Grill Room in the carefree years before the abdication. The Café Royal’s popularity continued into the second half of the 20th century when stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and David Bowie brought a new, youthful glamour to proceedings.

Now the Israeli group The Set is hoping that by creating a lavish new hotel — parts of which open for business this week — the extended Café Royal can compete with rivals The Ritz and Savoy in urban magnificence. As Chipperfield walks me around the first two floors of the hotel, he explains his approach to making new public spaces that feel as if they have always been part of their illustrious historical framework. For example, there is the elegant Café 1865, with its Sienna marble walls, and the modern brasserie with its snaking red leather banquette and adjoining cocktail bar. Of the restored spaces, the Ten Room is an Art Deco-style dining room complete with Murano glass lights, while the Grill Room and Domino Room are sugary pieces of architectural confectionery, much as they were in their heyday, jewel boxes of gold leaf and mirrors and infinite reflections.

Above this are five floors containing 159 guest rooms with Carrara marble baths, parquet floors and fashionably mute colour schemes. It is in the six grandest suites where the real show starts: four have original Belle Epoque sitting rooms, another features a Tudor-style fireplace worthy of Hampton Court, while the final one is located in a Neoclassical dome high above Piccadilly Circus and has a £3,000+ a night rate.

In many ways, Chipperfield, 58, is an unlikely custodian of such a project. With his heavy-rimmed black glasses and austere blue V-neck jumper, he appears every inch the Modernist of popular imagination. He is best known for his fiercely intellectual buildings on the Continent, including the 12-year project to rebuild the bombed-out Neues Museum in Berlin. Teutonic masters such as Schinkel and Mies van der Rohe are invoked by critics discussing his work; and many admire his skilful handling of concrete. In the late 1980s he opened an architectural exhibition space called 9H (referencing the hardest of lead-pencil gradings), showcasing the likes of Herzog & de Meuron and austere Austrians. It is hard to imagine that the ormolu flights of fancy of the Grill Room are to his tastes, but Chipperfield disagrees.

‘I thought it would be interesting to be much more wilful, camp even, than we normally would,’ he explains. ‘It’s very fake, very theatrical. It is difficult to separate oneself from one’s design moralities. Should you do it? Maybe not. But once you’ve decided to do it, you have to go with it.’

To be fair, the Chipperfield effect at the Café Royal is extremely tasteful — think timeless luxe rather than Versace bling — but his willingness to reveal a playful side perhaps comes from the fact that he is at last being recognised in the country of his birth. He grew up in rural isolation on a farm in Devon and studied architecture at Kingston Polytechnic and the Architectural Association. His first major piece of work, after stints in the offices of both Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, was the Issey Miyake shop on Sloane Street in 1983, the success of which took him to Japan and led to the opening of his practice in 1984. In the subsequent decade he built more abroad than he did at home, but he has recently won accolades for two significant new public galleries in Britain — the Turner Contemporary in Margate and The Hepworth in Wakefield — as well as acknowledgement by the establishment in the form of a knighthood in 2010 and the RIBA Gold Medal in 2011. Most notable of all for Londoners, last month he received planning permission for his first piece of substantial infrastructure in the capital: a 29-storey tower of offices and apartments at Waterloo and the remodelling of the station’s entrance to create a public square around the much-neglected Victory Arch.

Why has acceptance in Britain taken so long? Chipperfield sighs. He has much to say on the failings of the architectural system in Britain, where most major projects are won by competing on fees rather than for the best design, as happens elsewhere in Europe. ‘The only reason we got to do the galleries in Wakefield and Margate is because out of all the thousands of competitions we enter, there just happened to be a couple in England that we won,’ he explains. In the past he has said that the lack of enthusiasm for his work in his home country is because ‘it looks too dull; it doesn’t have enough bells and whistles’. So perhaps the current spike in his fortunes marks a shift in the aesthetic mood, a revival — whisper it — of the kind of South Bank brutalism with which Chipperfield’s buildings share a certain kinship. His Hepworth gallery, a concrete building inspired by local industrial architecture, was described by The Sunday Times critic Hugh Pearman as ‘heavy, thick-walled, non-reflective, non-populist, introvert’. And that’s intended as a compliment.

Chipperfield acknowledges the heft of architectural theory that goes into his buildings, but insists that an understanding of their lineage is not essential to appreciate them. ‘A building is no good if someone’s got to explain to you why it’s good. You can’t say you don’t know enough about architecture — that’s ridiculous. It’s got to work on many levels,’ he says. And perhaps it’s this ability to make a building that is both clever enough for critics and beautiful enough for everybody else that is finally winning over the British. He certainly seems to be doing something right, as the high-profile projects are beginning to roll in: in London there is his scheme to remodel the Royal Academy building on Burlington Gardens and an extension to the Geffrye Museum in Bethnal Green, as well as a swish apartment building in Kensington and a handful of private houses. Meanwhile his success abroad continues: in Berlin he has been appointed to restore Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery (‘A great compliment,’ he says); his offices in Shanghai and Milan — where he has designed shops for Dolce & Gabbana and Valentino — are also busy.

With all the sobriety displayed in The Hepworth and the Turner Contemporary, you might assume that Chipperfield is an ascetic. Far from it. At his 12th-floor studio above Waterloo Station a staff of more than 100 work in a cool, loft-like space where at lunchtime they can be seen perching at long tables with plates of prosciutto and figs, sipping perfectly executed macchiatos. Home is on the grand Regency thoroughfare of the John Nash-designed Portland Place, in an open-plan apartment where the rooms are divided by glass cases containing his personal collection of artworks, ceramics and family mementoes. He lives there with his Argentinian wife Evelyn Stern, a former academic and editor, and their three children. In a Financial Times interview Chipperfield described his typical weekend as a round of treats, including dinners at his favourite restaurants — The Wolseley or Scott’s — drinks at Claridge’s and a Sunday swim in the ornate Edwardian pool at the Royal Automobile Club. ‘Although that’s more my wife’s thing really,’ he says. ‘She was a professional swimmer.’ He enjoys watching rugby and is particularly keen on the theatre: ‘London’s great privilege,’ he calls it. ‘There seems to be no compromise in the intellectual ambition — why can’t architecture be like that?’ His social life reflects his interests, with friends including the actor Peter Eyre and the artist Antony Gormley, for whom he designed a studio.

Chipperfield’s comfortable life extends to Berlin, where he has an office of 150 people and spends much of his time. ‘We are building a new house for ourselves there; I call it the ambassador’s residence,’ he tells me. For holidays, he spends a month each summer at a four-storey beachfront house of his own design in the small Galician fishing village of Corrubedo in northwest Spain.

Friends paint a picture of a man that is sometimes at odds with the rather stern-faced Chipperfield who appears in public. ‘He can be terribly funny,’ says Simon Wallis, director of The Hepworth gallery. Jamie Fobert, who worked for Chipperfield for eight years and is now a leading architect in his own right, says: ‘He is incredibly generous; in the summer people from the office go down to stay at his house in Spain and they work together in the mornings. It’s very civilised. And Evelyn is an amazing hostess — they entertain the whole time. When I joined his office in 1988 it was tiny, there were only five of us, and he used to listen to the cricket on the radio all day. He’s very English like that.’

A more dandified Chipperfield now seems to be emerging, the kind who enjoys the theatricality of the Café Royal and has perhaps been affected by working within its gilded walls. Before he leaves the site office there is one more important decision for the architect to make. He is presented with a menu that has been designed for his wife’s birthday dinner the following day. Does he approve? He looks at the elegant card, points to the black type and orders just one change: ‘Make it gold,’ he says. ES